Computational Humanities

Debates in the Digital Humanities are animated by questions about which practices, modes of inquiry, and ways of knowing should be acknowledged and engaged with. One area that continues to elicit equal measures of excitement and anxiety is work that is labeled as quantitative or as computational analysis. While text analysis has been the most prominent example, recent advances in technologies for images and sound have expanded computational approaches to other cultural forms. New forms of data from listservs and code repositories to tweets and other social media content have only enlivened debates about what counts as digital humanities scholarship, what kind of knowledge computational approaches can produce, who should be engaged in data inquiry, and what are its stakes. Theorizing the role of computation in humanities, it seems, is as much about power, prestige, and precarity as it is about p-values, and this volume aims to put all of these issues in conversation. Acknowledging the need for a space for reflexive and specialized debates about computation in DH, Debates in the Digital Humanities: Computational Humanities invites contributions that engage with computational and technical issues as well as about the role of computation itself.